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The presidential fitness test: An exercise in humiliation?
00:25:04
President Donald Trump is reinstating the presidential fitness test. Could it do more harm than good?
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- [00:03]
Elahe Izadi
I remember it vividly. I was in sixth grade gym class. We all lined up on the basketball court and the dread sank in. It was time to take the Presidential Fitness Test. We had to do push ups, climb up a rope, run a mile, toe reaches and pull ups. Pull ups. I failed miserably. My scrawny 11 year old arms could not pull me up if my life depended on it. I felt like a failure. And this happened once every year. If you went to American public schools before 2012, that's when the Obama administration retired the program. You probably also experienced the Presidential Fitness Challenge. For many students, this was just another day in gym class. But it turns out lots of people shared my feelings about it.
- [00:56]
Jennifer Sargent
Every time they announced, oh, we're going to do the fitness test again. It was just, you know, just feelings of dread.
- [01:05]
Elahe Izadi
The Post recently put out a call to readers asking them what they remembered about the test. People responded by the hundreds and we called some of them back to ask them about their vivid memories.
- [01:18]
Jennifer Sargent
The boys did the push ups and the girls had to hold themselves up. And I had no upper body strength. And it was just absolutely demoralizing. All the girls, I guess, would have to do that hang on the bar. You have to get up there and everyone is in a circle watching you. And I would get up there and just immediately fall down like a rag doll. I could never do it and it was just deeply humiliating. It was demoralizing and it was traumatic, kind of because kids would make fun of you. Because I was smaller than the other kids, I couldn't do things physically as well as they could. It always felt so embarrassing to me to be the kid who couldn't even come close to what the other kids were doing. I wish that they had done something to make us feel empowered by it and that we could be successful rather than once or twice a year you just stood around and were a failure in front of all of your peers. And now I regularly work out in the gym now. And now I can do that stupid hang. I just, you know, look at these things. They never leave you. You can never escape them.
- [02:39]
Elahe Izadi
Well, guess what? The Presidential Fitness Test is coming back. Thanks to President Donald Trump.
- [02:45]
Gretchen Reynolds
I'm pleased to announce that we're officially restoring the Presidential Fitness Test and the Presidential Fitness Award. And it's going to be a very big thing.
- [02:54]
Podcast Advertiser
From the late 1950s until.
- [02:58]
Elahe Izadi
From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Elahe izadi. It's Wednesday, August 20th. Today we go deep on the Presidential Fitness test. Trump signed an executive order at the end of July reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test. He called it a quote, wonderful tradition that will help kids get in shape. I speak with the Post's health columnist Gretchen Reynolds, who heard from so many people about what this test meant for them. And Gretchen walks me through where this fitness test came from, what researchers say about its effectiveness, and what a new version of the test could look like. Gretchen, thank you for joining me to talk about this, the Presidential Fitness Test.
- [03:51]
Gretchen Reynolds
I'm very glad to be back.
- [03:54]
Elahe Izadi
So, Gretchen, as we said, President Trump is bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test. Before we go in too deep about the old test, what did he say about why he's bringing this back?
- [04:08]
Gretchen Reynolds
Well, what he said was that the main reason was to help combat an epidemic of unhealthiness among children, obesity, inactivity. They mentioned in the executive order, military preparedness, and that bringing back the presidential test would help to start making children healthier and presumably also help them to lose weight, become more active. There's no timeline, but presumably soon. And it would be overseen by a council of experts who at this point are mostly athletes, most of whom have ties to Trump, including The golfer Bryson DeChambeau, who has represented the Trump golf brand for several years, and the National Football League kicker Harrison Butker, and, I believe, several wrestlers.
- [05:04]
Elahe Izadi
I'm sure we could probably do a whole episode just about this question, but just how big of a problem is childhood obesity and poor health in young people at this moment?
- [05:15]
Gretchen Reynolds
Oh, it's definitely a huge problem. No one disputes that. The most recent statistics that I've seen are that about 23% of children, and that is up to about age 16, I believe, are. In fact, they do have obesity. Beginning in about 1960, obesity was fairly rare among children especially, and it has definitely increased and so has inactivity. The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, they suggest that the official recommendation is that all children and teenagers get at least an hour of vigorous exercise, not just walking around, but vigorous exercise every day. At this point, less than a quarter of children and adolescents get even close to that much. So we have a definite epidemic of both obesity and inactivity among young children. And that does lead to pretty significant amount of ill health. So, yes, we have a problem. Whether the Presidential Fitness Test is the answer is definitely a question.
- [06:28]
Elahe Izadi
So let's talk more about this question. And, you know, as a kid, I never really thought about why I was even doing this Presidential Fitness Test. It just seemed to be like this is just what Everyone does in school. But I never really thought to look into why am I doing this and when did it start? What is the backstory to this? When did this fitness test begin?
- [06:48]
Gretchen Reynolds
The actual Presidential Fitness Test began under President Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. And it was a very straightforward response to some emerging information that United States children were not as fit as children in Europe. And there really was concern that that would have effects on our military readiness, that we just were not keeping up with Europe. And so Eisenhower started this program where kids would be tested at school on their fitness, and presumably that would somehow motivate them to become more fit. Part of the idea was that the Presidential Fitness Test would motivate children because if you were in the top percent, it was the top 15% and actually got the award. You also got a patch. And usually you got to stand up in front of your whole school and assembly and have your name ready. And the program expanded in the next few years under President Kennedy. A country is as strong really as its citizens. And I think that mental and physical health, mental and physical vigor go hand in hand. Who was a very big fitness advocate and made sure that the test was pretty much nationwide by the mid-1960s. And it remained in place in various forms. The actual parts of the test, the benchmarks for how well children had to do those, changed over the years. But the Presidential Test and the Presidential Award remained in place until officially 2012.
- [08:36]
Elahe Izadi
So generally, how did it work? Because, you know, I remember doing specific exercises, as you mentioned, that the actual benchmarks changed over the years. But generally speaking, how. How did this work?
- [08:49]
Gretchen Reynolds
Generally speaking, there were tests that measured kids endurance, and that would be either the shuttle run or the mile or both. They had to do sit ups and push ups and pull ups, which measured strength. And they did the sit and reach, which was supposed to measure flexibility. And in order to get the award, you had to be in the top 15% nationwide on every one of those tests. You had to have endurance, you had to have strength, and you had to be flexible. And that's really hard for grownups, that's really hard for athletes. But we expected of kids. And there were times when the benchmarks, again, they changed somewhat from year to year, but sometimes they were really high. You had to do at least 40 sit ups, you had to run a six and a half minute mile. Those are really high benchmarks. So what it came down to is very few children passed, very few children got the award. It would be usually 2 to 3% of children nationwide when these tests were developed. What a number of experts have said to me is basically they were developed around measures of athletic performance. That's really what they were looking at, which is not health. So what they were looking at is, would you be good on the baseball team or would you be good on the cross country team? That's not the same thing as are you fit and healthy? So what kids were hearing was you are not fit and they're 10, 11, 12 years old. So if the test was designed to make kids more fit, it's probably fair to say it was not accomplishing that.
- [10:47]
Elahe Izadi
So this Presidential Fitness Test came to an end. Can you tell me about that?
- [10:52]
Gretchen Reynolds
The Presidential Fitness Test formally ended in 2012 when President Barack Obama disbanded it. But even before then, some schools had stopped using it. There was a pretty clear understanding among exercise scientists that this was not working, if by working we mean that it was making kids become more active and avoid obesity. So there were a lot of questions about whether this was an effective way to get children to be active. And President Obama basically said it's not and did institute a new approach to testing.
- [11:34]
Elahe Izadi
Yeah, what is that new approach to testing? Because I'm wondering, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about this problem of childhood obesity and just poor health in young people. And I'm curious, how did this new program work and did it improve the situation?
- [11:50]
Gretchen Reynolds
The new approach to testing was called Fitness Gram. And the idea with Fitness Gram was that you would try and test children on elements that were more related to health than just athletic performance. And some of the tests are still sort of the same. They still had a shuttle run, they no longer had the mile run, but they still did have some tests of your aerobic endurance and your muscular strength. But they were set up. At least they tried to set them up. So it wasn't just competitive. It wasn't just children competing against one another, and only a certain number did well. The idea was you started setting sort of these zones of what is healthy and you told children sort of where they fit into that zone. And the important part of that, at least according to the researchers I talked with, was it was meant to have follow up. So you would send home a little report card to the children and their parents that said this is where your child sort of wound up in terms of endurance. Here's some suggestions for how they might improve that. It was meant to be part of a whole program where you would have PE classes that were designed to actually try and improve children's fitness. It's very important to say here that the Fitnessgram and all the people involved with it had a lot of really good intentions. But after Fitnessgram was instituted, childhood obesity continued to climb and inactivity became even worse. Children now are often sitting at least 10 hours a day. That's not normal for kids, but in fact, the level of inactivity in children has been growing year over year now for just decades.
- [13:52]
Elahe Izadi
After the break, what the science says about the best ways to keep kids healthy and fit, and whether a presidential fitness test is part of that. We'll be right back.
- [14:06]
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- [15:09]
Elahe Izadi
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- [15:12]
Gretchen Reynolds
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- [15:15]
Elahe Izadi
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- [15:30]
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- [15:33]
Elahe Izadi
That's for an entire year.
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Gretchen Reynolds
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Elahe Izadi
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- [15:42]
Gretchen Reynolds
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- [15:44]
Elahe Izadi
Go to washingtonpost.com subscribe that's washingtonpost.com subscribe so Gretchen, obviously, as you've described, this has been an ongoing problem, poor health and children. President Obama tried to revamp the old fitness test and replace it with something else, but you know, we still have a problem. So President Trump is bringing a fitness test back and will it be like the old one that I did as a kid and other people have done as children? Will kids be out here doing toe reaches and climbing up ropes.
- [16:24]
Gretchen Reynolds
There were no specifics in the executive order about the Presidential Fitness Test, and I did not get a response from the press office at the Health and Human Services Department. So it's not clear what measures will be involved, whether there will be the dreaded mile running again, whether there will be pull ups. Certainly the president seemed very enthusiastic about sort of the original test, which did include push ups, sit ups, the pull up, and the mile run. There also were no researchers or scientists so far who are part of the Presidential Council on Fitness and Nutrition, which will be overseeing this. So it's not clear yet what tests will be involved.
- [17:16]
Elahe Izadi
I'm just thinking also about this idea of, like, the old fitness test and how it wasn't really that effective. The replacement doesn't seem to have, you know, generated better outcomes necessarily. But like, thinking about the old test and just the idea of, like, how much trauma even adults well into their 60s, 70s still carry from it. And can you just, like, describe a little bit more about that? Like, what is it about the old test and how people interacted with it that led them to carry these lifelong memories?
- [17:51]
Gretchen Reynolds
I did talk to researchers about this, and the funny thing is the minute I said to a researcher, I'm writing a story about the Presidential Fitness Test, I'd say, oh, no. And in particular, researchers who deal with exercise behavior, because we do have a better understanding of why people exercise and also why they don't. And the fact of the matter is, most of us don't. At least 75% of us get almost zero exercise. And a lot of that researchers now think, and some of this will sound almost cliched, but big, big studies have borne this out. The reason people decide to exercise or not is because they enjoy it. And again, that sounds almost facile, but that is how we respond. It is how we decide we want to do something. You have to like what you're doing physically to keep doing it, especially if you are a child and don't have a lot of other experiences to compare it to. So it looks like for a a lot of young people, the Presidential Fitness Test became associated with a really unpleasant experience, and that's what they took away from exercise. The number of people who responded and said, this all happened 30 years ago and I still hate exercise really kind of astounded me. It made me really sad to read some of those responses. There were also a fair number of people who said, and I used to hate exercise, but I finally discovered I really like riding my bike or swimming is fun. And now they're doing it.
- [19:48]
Elahe Izadi
Was there anyone who responded who liked it?
- [19:51]
Gretchen Reynolds
Yes, yes, there were. And I should be very clear about that. There definitely were people who said this made me feel good about myself. I practiced sit ups so I could do this. There are people who will respond to this kind of somewhat competitive approach. There also are people who are good athletes. They will do well. They will always enjoy something like this. And again, we're getting responses from people who remember this really viscerally. For a lot of people, it probably had almost no impact one way or another. But the group of people for whom it had an impact, particularly a negative one, is large enough that we really do have to think about the impacts that reinstituting the test could have.
- [20:40]
Elahe Izadi
You know, this is such an intractable problem, or at least it seems like it. And it seems like, you know, maybe compared to when I was growing up or when you were growing up, kids are less active now because there's more screens. You know, they're preoccupied with things that we just didn't have. And isn't it good to just have them do at least something mandated by the government to get them moving and kind of measure where they stand? I'm just wondering about the counterargument to why it would be a bad thing to bring this back.
- [21:14]
Gretchen Reynolds
And I should make it clear, I don't necessarily say that it is an unadulterated bad thing to bring this back, nor did the researchers say that to me. I mean, I think everyone is willing to try various things. What the researchers said to me was just having an isolated presidential fitness test once or twice a year is unlikely to have any beneficial effects for the vast majority of children and young people, and for at least some subset of them is likely to be quite aversive. It will not help them like exercise. But the bigger issue is it's not part of a sort of whole ecosystem of finding a way to make children more active and healthier. In the executive order, there's no mention of money that would go to schools to help them ensure they have physical education classes. An awful lot of schools have either reduced or eliminated PE classes altogether. There are no resources, at least in this executive order, for training PE teachers to help children like exercise. And a lot of funding for things like after school programs, which are a good way to keep children moving, have been eliminated in the new administration. The executive order mentions sports. Most of the researchers I talked to said sports are not the answer to getting kids active.
- [22:58]
Elahe Izadi
Really?
- [22:59]
Gretchen Reynolds
Oh, you have a tiny subset of kids who are good at Sports. And the higher you go in age, the fewer that number is. Once you get into varsity sports, the number of kids who can play is tiny. And just on a very practical level, sports aren't necessarily a great way to get kids moving. Some kids are on the bench. A lot of sports, you're only active for a few minutes over the course of an entire quarter. You know, it's not really a great way to get kids more active.
- [23:32]
Elahe Izadi
So, Gretchen, let's put our hypothetical hats on. Let's put you in charge of a task force to get kids to exercise. Based on all your years of reporting, your conversations with researchers and experts, what would you recommend here that kids do?
- [23:47]
Gretchen Reynolds
The answers are in some ways simple but not easy because we do have to find ways to let kids play. And again, that is a little bit of a cliche, but kids love to play. If you watch them, if you really do just let them go out, don't give them a phone. They don't even have to have equipment. They will start playing. They'll play tag. They'll pretend they're animals. They'll do all kinds of stuff that they're just moving and enjoying how well their body can respond. If we can find ways to help kids expand on that, to just enjoy being in motion, not. Not benchmark them against each other, show them ways to do it together, that they can play tug of war tag, just have fun moving, sit less, stare at a screen a lot less. That would be great.
- [24:58]
Elahe Izadi
Well, Gretchen, thank you so much for joining and explaining all this.
- [25:01]
Gretchen Reynolds
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [25:03]
Elahe Izadi
Oh, wait, I want to ask you this. I want to ask you this. Gretchen, did you ever take this test yourself?
- [25:08]
Gretchen Reynolds
Yes, every year of my elementary and middle school. And honestly, I'm almost embarrassed at this point to admit it, but I actually got the Presidential Fitness Award every year because I was very skinny and very fast and very bendy. I could always do the sit and reach, but it was terrible to watch.
- [25:35]
Elahe Izadi
It was even terrible for you, who was, like, at the top of.
- [25:39]
Gretchen Reynolds
Because my friends didn't pass, they felt really bad. It didn't translate in any way to me being good at sports. I was still just terrible at softball, which was what the kids in my age group played. So I did fine on the test, and it made me feel bad about exercise.
- [26:08]
Elahe Izadi
Gretchen Reynolds is a health columnist for the Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. If you love the show, help other people discover it by leaving a rating on Spotify or a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Today's show was produced by Peter Bresnan. It was mixed by Shawn Carter and edited by Ariel Plotnick. Thanks to Jennifer Sargent, Devin Bakoumb and Julie Nelson. You heard them at the start of the show talking about their experiences with the Presidential Fitness Test. And thanks also to Emily Kotick and Teresa Tamkins. I'm Elahe Izadi. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from the Washington Post.
- [26:55]
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